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mrspoonsi sends this report from Business Insider:
"Microsoft is generating $2 billion per year in revenue from Android patent royalties, says Nomura analyst Rick Sherlund in a new note on the company. He estimates that the Android revenue has a 95% margin, so it's pretty much all profit. This money, says Sherlund, helps Microsoft hide the fact that its mobile and Xbox groups are burning serious cash."

The benchmark is Microsoft's return on investment from their investment in Mobile, starting in the early 90's I'd guess.

This gets to an odd contradiction right in the summary: the mobile division is "burning serious cash," yet also making $2B which is "pretty much all profit." It's as if the author sees no connection between investing in a business unit to generate intellectual property, and subsequently profiting from that investment.

Most of the intellectual property (basically just FAT licenses) actually came from the windows division. If you want your phone to plug into a windows machine you pay the short ugly looking character at the bridge.

I'm surprised phone manufacturers have not abandoned FAT. Since Android 4.0 devices have appeared as MTP storage devices to computers. MTP abstracts away the underlying filesystem so they could use EXT3 or pretty much anything they wanted to.

I suppose maybe there is a case for using FAT on SD cards, but many phones only use internal memory anyway. MTP is the only way it will ever be accessed.

I'm still quivering from their business tactics, especially back in the 90s, but now that I'm older and wiser, I gather that in the business world, the ladder is made of other people. Doesn't mean I'm happy about it, it just means that Microsoft is likely middle of the pack on ethics.

It's making $2B from Android in revenue, most of which is profit, but that doesn't necessarily imply that the mobile division is profitable. All it says is that that $2B, taken in isolation (so without the losses other parts of the division might have), is almost pure profit. I'm not saying the mobile division isn't profitable (I honestly don't know), but the summary doesn't pretend to say either way.

If you exclude Halo 2 and 3. Also if you dig into the financials of the xbox you will see a serious money sink. I got 3 prospectuses from them. I thought I had to be reading it wrong. No they were really spending that kind of money with a massive no ROI. I sold my stock.

Dont get me wrong. XBOX is wildly popular. But profitable? Not so much.

If you exclude Halo 2 and 3. Also if you dig into the financials of the xbox you will see a serious money sink. I got 3 prospectuses from them. I thought I had to be reading it wrong. No they were really spending that kind of money with a massive no ROI. I sold my stock.

Dont get me wrong. XBOX is wildly popular. But profitable? Not so much.

Having not see a recent prospectus I can just imagine the bleed on the phone division. Though that division did come up with many of those patents. And before everyone goes 'they are so obvious'. MS did something you didnt they made a patent out of it. The had been working on the smart phone since about 1998. They unfortunately came up with WinCE to show for it.

Never mind that gamers tend to be very fickle. If a better game comes out on Sony or Nintendo, the XBox gathers dust. So Microsoft's efforts to use the XBox as a gateway into pwning your home, making you rely upon them for $ervice$ isn't panning like they wished. I still can't fathom why they continue to fool around in this non-core area. Why not just buy a movie studio or a bunch of golf courses?

Not so much that users are fickle, more to do with the fact that here is very little lock-in on games consoles...Each generation tends to be incompatible with the previous, and most games run on all the major consoles so there is very little to stop you from choosing a different brand of console when you move on to the next generation.

Plus, physical consoles were pretty much always loss leaders... Sega, Sony, Nintendo would lose money on their hardware and make it up on selling titles - both their own and from third-party developers. Is Microsoft not including all of profits from licensing in their reports?

Plus, physical consoles were pretty much always loss leaders... Sega, Sony, Nintendo would lose money on their hardware and make it up on selling titles - both their own and from third-party developers. Is Microsoft not including all of profits from licensing in their reports?

That's including all licensing fees, Live subscriptions, etc. The XBOX division as a whole is billions of dollars in the red.

A whole shitload of the XBOX is based on on line servers or gold membership for usability If MS decided to shut it all down, your single player disc based games will still work, but all the rest is gone.

With the original xbox, online play was often added as an afterthought to many games...For many games on the 360, online play is an integral part of the game and in many games online is the only way to play multiplayer, direct lan connections and split screen are often not supported.

Nintendo has sold two console at a lost the NES (very small lose) and the WiiU. All console producing companies make it on licencing of the Software, when you only need to sell a few games to make a profit, it not really that bad. You have to remember they get a chunk of every game sold.

Seriously though, the system needs to be changed. When the only way to play the game involves suing everyone else, there's obviously something wrong that needs fixing. Unfortunately, there're so many other things in this country that are screwed up, that it's hard to put patent reform before fixing health care, ending spying on citizens, stopping discrimination based on orientation, reducing our involvement in foreign conflicts, and a long list of other issue

Games are art, and are software.Most games are 95% art, 5% math, and 100% software.Math CAN be done as software, but so can art and many other non-math things. Some software is math. A LOT of software has little to do with math.

> math isn't supposed to be patentable.

That's a common misconception, started and encouraged by people with a particular agenda. The rule in the US is:

The LAWS of nature, including mathematics, are not patentable.

Note that it's the basic laws that aren't patentable. Things that USE those laws are.

I'm thinking from the perspective of a creator or consumer of a game. Over 90 percent of the budget will grow into art versus the math for collision detection and such. The buyer / player chooses a game primarily based on it's characters, graphics, and storyline, all artistic elements. I'd bet more than 90% of players have commented on a games graphics and fewer than 5% have said somethingl like "wow this game has awesome physics stimulation".

If my house cost $10 in bricks and mortar and $200,000 for light fittings. The house took 3 men 3 months to complete and the lights took 5 men 3 months to complete. My house is 99.99995% light fittings.

What's more, the math 'effort' was probably mostly implemented before the game was ever even thought of - but it is still there, even if it's effort free.

Thinking about that for a minute, seems that statement his true, and almost meaningless such that it's misleading. Lara Croft is of course software, and pure art. No mathematicians were harmed in the making of this character. Music - rhythm, tone, and harmony is math. Although harmony is a mathematical phenomenon, you would be fooling yourself, and doing yourself a disservice, to say "eh, music is just math."

Technically it's only the implementation of an idea that is supposed to be patentable. With physical patents if you can accomplish the same thing by other means then it's fair game.

Somehow in software they've decided to allow patenting the *idea* of momentum when scrolling via swiping, or bounceback when you hit the end.

The equivalent to patenting physical implementations would be to allow protection of their *implementation* of an idea--and in the software world that implementation is already protected by copyright, so there's really no need for software patents.

The equivalent to patenting physical implementations would be to allow protection of their *implementation* of an idea--and in the software world that implementation is already protected by copyright, so there's really no need for software patents.

Only in the most technical sense that computers interpret numbers to operate.

Very little of the programming I've done over the years involved much mathematics. Even with big batch jobs that did bill processing, the math itself was only a very small part of the code compared to the SQL, cursor iteration, error handling, and reporting aspects of the programs.

There is also the question of whether something like queueing theory should really be considered "mathematics." Yes, it relies on statistics and c

I think "obvious to someone skilled in the art" is actually a lousy test. What's interesting is whether the invention will surface even without granting a state-sanctioned monopoly on it. If there is a million engineers worldwide working in a certain field, and an invention is non-obvious to 99% of them, there are still 10000 who could do something similar. To grant a single one of them a 20 year monopoly on it is hardly a win for society. It might have been different back in the olden days, when skilled en

It might have been different back in the olden days, when skilled engineers were actually rare.

There was a very interesting documentary series a few decades ago ("Connections" by James Burke) that looked at technology through the ages. One of the common themes was how technologies were invented and re-invented at different times and places. It's only modern communications that prevent re-invention, because the knowledge of the "original" invention travels around the world.

They could just implement their own system, like Ext4 or something, the problem being that Fat and NTFS are like the only things Windows can read and write. You can get some programs that let you do it, but they are not as seamless as something like fuse is in Linux mounting windows partitions. It is a problem created by Microsoft, which apparently they have earned 2 billion for.

I have never understood this. Windows users are used to installing drivers for each new piece of hardware. Why not bundle an ext4 driver? The device could even have a small FAT partiton (without the patented parts of FAT) that contains the driver for the larger ext4 partition.

For some reason filesystem drivers (be they physical, usb, network, etc) appear to be VERY hard to write for windows. I have yet to see a 3rd party filesystem driver for windows that wasn't either broken or unstable. This includes NFS, EXT, even encrypted volumes. The best we've been able to get in most cases is a 3rd party file manager that can read/write the partitions, almost none of them work with the default file browser.

The common use case for USB sticks and such is (was?) to plug it into other people's computers, to quickly transfer files etc. There's no opportunity to install the driver there, nor would any sane person permit such.

A better question is, why not just use UDF? Windows supports it for both reading and writing, beginning with Vista (XP supported it read-only). OS X and Linux both fully support it. No patent fees.

I legitimately wonder how many (if any) of the features covered by the patents in question would not have been implemented in Android if not for the work of whoever filed the patent. If the answer is few or none, then patents are subtracting rather than adding value to society in this domain. If the answer is many, then there is at least an argument to be made.

I legitimately wonder how many (if any) of the features covered by the patents in question would not have been implemented in Android if not for the work of whoever filed the patent. If the answer is few or none, then patents are subtracting rather than adding value to society in this domain. If the answer is many, then there is at least an argument to be made.

Except Android works around a bunch of them, and some of them are to the benefit of them all because it forced Google to innovate and we're better fo

The only thing stopping Google from abandoning Microsoft's patents is that the end result would be worse than all the cheap Chinese rip-off tablets and phones.

That's only potentially true when the patents are disclosed. It's fashionable to not disclose what the specific patents argued to be infringed actually are (or the mechanics of how they're infringed) when trying to license a portfolio.

And if not, what features/functions of Android are the patents for? It strikes me that most things Android does that would be covered by a patent would also apply to Apple.

Now, Apple may have other cross-licensing/patent agreements for other stuff so they aren't making a cash payment to MS, but instead a payment in kind, but I'm still curious what Android does that MS holds patents on.

Microsoft isn't patent trolling here. They would be patent trolling if they were simply holding onto broadly defined patents to use them offensively. The patents in question, which I believe relate to data storage and file systems, have been used by Microsoft for a very long time and have been challenged unsuccessfully before. Microsoft's own engineers did the work, not Google's. Google and various Android manufacturers are free to not implement them.

Not as long as Microsoft filesystems are the de-facto file systems for SD cards by virtue of their desktop monopoly.

Right, Microsoft is abusing their MONOPOLY, not patent trolling.

And there certainly are workarounds Google could implement. How about if USB-connected Android phones presented a small FAT12 (or ISO9660, or UFS) partition to the OS, which merely contained a (8.3 file-name) installer for the Windows EXT2 file system driver? That would result in widespread desktop support for EXT2 file systems,

Microsoft isn't patent trolling here. They would be patent trolling if they were simply holding onto broadly defined patents to use them offensively. The patents in question, which I believe relate to data storage and file systems, have been used by Microsoft for a very long time and have been challenged unsuccessfully before.

Citation? B&N challenged the patents and it resulted in a partially sealed settlement. The patents were judged on their merits.

Microsoft rarely takes allegations of infringement to court, they almost always prefer to settle for royalties or cross-licencing. That being said, the FAT patents have survived many legal challenge and their validity has been upheld.

of all the products Redmond hasnt ritualistically pedaled into the ground, XBox seems to have defied even ballmers best attempts. their unfortunate XBox 1 unveiling which included an actual redaction of features and freedoms when compared to its competitors was certainly bad PR, but its not a killing stroke. XBox still maintains excellent game titles, and despite the hardware being plagued with flaws a return policy that basically sends you a free one console when yours unpredictably dies. its got netfli

Xbox is still there only because M$ has deep pockets. The original Xbox lost billions, the 360 lost a couple more billions in its first two years on the market and then never made a steady profit, they can also hide the development expenses for the Xbox in their R&D division, not to mention the expenses for the development of the Xbox OS. The Xbox would not be a viable platform for anyone else, but M$. That's a fact.

Patents aren't about promoting the progress of science and the useful arts, they're about a business model based on rent-extraction via arcane legal means. As alternative manufacturing options such as 3D printing mature (assuming they're not strangled by the patent titans) patents will become as obsolete and ineffective as copyright is now.

Oh don't worry, that will be the next war. If you thought the copyright war was fierce, wait 'til companies who sell some plastic junk for big bucks because their name is printed to one side or because the part breaks easily and may only be made by the original maker get to feel the loss when people notice that for the price that part costs they could as well buy a 3D printer and be independent from them forever.

Wait until their business model of vendor lock-in no longer works.

There are entire companies (and I'm not talking about mom'n'pop shops) dependent on that very model of selling appliances dirt cheap and making money with the spare parts and the consumables. And printer manufacturers are the least of your concern in this matter. You're about to see the battle between people with 3D printers vs. the car industry and its associated industries.

And this will be very, very ugly. If you thought the MAFIAA had ties in politics, wait 'til this turd hits the spinning blades. This time a LOT of jobs are on the line, and I'd be very surprised if that one goes down with a breeze. Expect some legal shit to come down that makes the whole copyright legal bull seem legit, sane and balanced.

XBox is Microsoft's doorway into the home. Companies have been fighting for decades to control the living room and there are no clear winners (Wii did well but didn't win). XBox can provide a unified system between TV, computer, and mobile device through Azure. When Microsoft does unification well there would be no need to use any non-Microsoft system.

There's also the importance of diversification. A company as big as Microsoft shouldn't have only one product.

At least someone is making money from Android besides Google and Samsung. I really wish Sony can get their act together and release an amazing phone. They have it in them to be able to do better than Samsung and Apple.

Now if they absorb the Blackberry patents they will be unstoppable in the mobile highway patent troll robbery market. Hell people will not even notice if they become the worlds largest patent troll, seems that they are much better at that than actually creating software. Unusual bedfellows Apple and Microsoft?

Microsoft's so called "IP" is being more valuable than their actual production of software. Microsoft is becoming little more than a huge IP and patent troll firm that has managed with their operatin

It should be ILLEGAL for any company to make statements like "xyz is violating our patents" unless that statement contains details of which patents are being violated and which products/features/etc are doing the violating.

If Microsoft is forced to reveal in public which patents are being violated and how, it would allow the Linux community to evaluate that information and find prior art where it exists or find ways to make linux not violate the patent (e.g. kernel option to disable the relavent code or rewrite the code to not violate) and generally make it harder for MS)

Remember the TomTom case, evidence came out about a specific FAT patent related to long file names and TomTom just disabled that feature (since they didn't actually need it)

In the US, you can get pure plans and unlocked phones, too.Go to amazon.com and search "unlocked cell phone."Plenty of stores have them, even your local drug store.Any cell phone carrier offers plans without a phone bundled in.T-Mobile and many smaller carriers base their business around them. For instance, here is an advertisement: http://www.t-mobile.com/bring-your-own-phone.html [t-mobile.com]

But seriously, open your fucking eyes, people. Here we have a private enterprise that put a break on the development of a personal computer for 20 something years, and now it's taxing the development and adoption of an operating system that was written from scratch, using UNIX philosophy which Micro$oft neither invented nor indeed implemented.

Just like copyrights, patents are not worth crap to individual inventors because the chances of making a return on the investment with one, two, or even a hundred inventions are miniscule. So the inventors sign over their inventions to capitalists for either a small lump sum or a regular paycheck; and so do the artist with copyright, because it ultimately makes sense for them economically. The capitalists, on the other hand, are wielding tens of thousands of patents; just like the art producers are controlling significant proportions of the entire catalog. And when they control, say, 10% of all published ideas, they can finally make patents (and copyrights) pay. The art business is ugly, we all heard that, but the technology is uglier! With patents, in particular, the best way to maximize the return is by suing everyone who dares to innovate. The point being, everyone has to keep using the same shit invented 20 or 40 years ago, and pay, pay, and pay again to some bastard who neither invented nor encouraged invention [1], but simply invested into exclusive rights. This was true for the steam engine, and it is true for the latest, smallest, sexiest computers of tomorrow.

[1] Don't believe me? Look it up. Multiple studies were conducted, and no correlation was found between patent law strength on one hand and the rate of innovation on the other.